


Open Up My Eyes To A New Light

by deathmallow



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Deleted Scene, F/M, Gen, Post 2X06, pre-garcy, that includes an actual deleted scene, vodka confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 12:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14873987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/pseuds/deathmallow
Summary: Post 2x06: the vodka confessional is open, and Flynn and Lucy step in.





	Open Up My Eyes To A New Light

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of hybridized the deleted scene with the canon "morning after" scene in 2x07. Title from Mumford and Sons/Baaba Maal's "There Will Be Time"

Old habit was hard to break, because ever since he’d taken that journal from Lucy’s hands in the cathedral, the drive to know more, to be forewarned, forearmed, more _ready_ for the situation ahead had been there. No different from Zagreb or Mogadishu or Kathmandu or Tikrit. He'd sometimes read history books on his own for fun in the past, but it now became mission prep. With two years to cool his heels and wait for that day he would apparently steal the Mothership and go meddle with the _Hindenburg_ , that left him with plenty of time on his hands and a need to fill it with something. Whatever books he could beg, steal or borrow--and he became very, very good at sneaking into university libraries--became just another intel gathering mission. 

He didn’t have the journal now, but the reading had become a habit, a welcome companion. At least for nearly three years he’d had that, and a sense of biding his time, however impatiently. The six months in solitary with nothing to do but stare at the walls and make impotent plans and relive the many, many failures had been harder.

Even all that time and all that reading hadn’t gotten him through everything the journal indicated. Of course, it didn’t help when it pointed him to topics like JFK where he could read for months. And how relieved he’d been to not be pointed towards assassinating Kennedy, in fact to save him as an awkward sickly teenager. He had no desire to collect the full set of presidential assassinations. Although in a bleak moment he’d figured he could have pinch hit for Leon Czolgosz well enough: one “can’t be trusted” Eastern European stood interchangeable for another to the American mind since about, what, 1870 or so?

Tonight’s companion was the Paxton Boys. A mid-18th century lynch mob--pre-Charles Lynch--who’d whipped up a frenzy at the tail end of the French and Indian War and murdered over a dozen peaceful native Conestoga in 1763, including children, while they huddled in protective custody in a jail in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Reading a local’s account of children scalped and their skulls split open was no easy thing. _Standing in the doorway, taking it all in at a glance. Shadowy figures--five, six? Hand tightening around his Glock that he’d instinctively grabbed when he heard the two dull thumps down the hall--five or six, didn’t matter, either way, too many._

 _The hallway light showed those ratty green pajama pants Lorena loved, only her legs visible on the far side of the bed where she must have lunged to attack them. The spray of blood on the pink paint of the bedroom wall and the white fur of the stuffed unicorn, and he couldn’t look at Iris’ face, couldn’t bear to see the devastation wrought there by the bullet and have that be the last sight he had of what the monsters that had come in the night had left of his little girl. Finally he counted five of them, and then the bullets started flying, one grazing his left arm. He turned for the stairs and ran._

He slammed the book shut; closed his eyes for a moment. No, not tonight. Not tonight, after the day he’d had in San Antonio, when everything seemed kind and forgiving if only for a little while. The knock on his door startled him, but it seemed almost miraculously timed. Nobody made social calls, so it had to be another mission. Rittenhouse had jumped again, and hopefully the Lifeboat had enough charge to give chase. He’d been kicking his own ass almost continually that he’d given Rittenhouse a Mothership with nearly unlimited jump capacity. _Very clever, Garcia, Mom the engineer would be proud. But it bit you in the ass quite neatly, didn’t it._ He half wondered if there was another plutonium core that they could steal, and if he could talk Christopher into it.

Answering the door and seeing Lucy leaning against the wall, looking up at him and brandishing a bottle of vodka in invitation, was a surprise. But something within him said a relieved, _Yes_ at it. The night they’d had--the way they’d finally worked together so effortlessly, when he’d just stopped trying so damn hard. Something about it felt like a bubble where all the pain and anxiety got shut out for a few hours. He hadn’t laughed like that in years, hadn’t managed to so utterly forget everything. It made sense that she’d want to hold onto that feeling of freedom from care just a little bit longer, rather than trying to sleep on that crappy couch and swigging vodka to get by. Though some part of him felt like he could barely contain the feeling that she’d chosen to come here, that of all people in this Godforsaken tetanus trap, she would come to him. 

For what exactly, though? _Jebote_ , if she wanted to sleep with him, even knowing full well he would be merely a painkiller and maybe a bit of revenge against Wyatt and his damn nocturnal symphony, he honestly wasn’t sure he was strong enough to say “no”. Not tonight, after feeling so seen and so human again because of her, for the first time in years. He _wanted_ , with a desperate intensity that seemed to ache in his very bones. She'd haunted his dreams and his waking hours both, and never more so than now, because he’d been so taken by the woman he’d built in his mind of that warrior-angel he’d met in 2014 who goaded him to keep fighting, and the mysterious woman who gave him the journal with ammunition for the war ahead and such deep glimpses into her soul. But it was even worse now, because it was Lucy herself he loved. What he felt tonight made everything so vivid and real that it made what came before seem like a faded and blurry sepia photograph, and so he waited to hear what she had to say, because if he started talking there was no way he salvaged the utter disaster he would make of it. Probably end up blurting out _Volim te, volim te, I love you_ , like a babbling idiot. She’d been let down by Wyatt with absolutely no grace so recently, and besides, no guarantee she’d take kindly to him making any kind of overture. Unlike certain other assholes in this bunker, he would recognize a woman he didn’t deserve, and wouldn’t burden her with his unruly emotions. 

It was on the tip of his tongue to say he was glad she came, but it might sound overeager, even smarmy. So he simply stood aside and gestured her in. As he closed the door and moved past her, she turned to him and wasted no time, blurting out, “I was thinking about what you said. About you not really knowing me. And...you’re not the only one who had a shortcut. I read your file.”

“So you said.” Throwing it in his face, daring him to remember when he’d been a good man and tried to help people. When he’d been able to be proud of the things he’d done. Not all of them, and he’d had his share of ghosts already, but at least in the balance he hadn’t been a monster.

She gave an exasperated shrug. “No, I mean I read your unredacted NSA file.” She might as well have just punched him in the gut. His unredacted file, which meant everything. Every detailed mission report and debrief. Deep background. Psychological evaluations, both routine and mission-obligated. “Agent Christopher gave it to us after you saved your half-brother.” She’d read deeply enough to know about Gabriel. Of course she had. Lucy Preston, scholar, would have read every note, every detail. She knew his blood type. She knew all about his father and his fists and his rage, and why he’d left home so young to go join the brewing Croatian rebellion. She knew he’d been in therapy for months after coming home from the school bombing in Damascus, after digging in the rubble for little girls’ bodies. The nightmares, the way he overprotected Iris to the point of smothering her, the way he couldn’t touch Lorena because she wanted another child so much, and he couldn’t agree to it, couldn’t bear to bring another child into this world to become missile fodder. Lorena had put her foot down. He needed to get help or she and Iris were going to Baltimore for good. He hated now that 2013 had been such a mess, given there had been so little after it. All of this, Lucy Preston knew. Set down on paper in unforgiving black and white. 

He laughed, feeling suddenly exposed. Oh, this was a complete karmic screwing, but only fair. This must have been how she felt every time he brought up things she’d written in that damn journal. He tried to be glib about it. “I’m going to bet Wyatt only cared enough to skim what Christopher pointed him to about Gabriel, Rufus just avoided it, and you of course read everything. Probably twice.” He shrugged, still trying to recover his equilibrium, but feeling like a boxer left reeling from an unexpected blow to the chin, half-knocked out but unable to just drop. “Know your enemy. One of the chief rules of the covert ops trade. I can’t blame you for it.” Maybe that’s how she’d gotten to him in 1780, in 1954. She’d known too much. He couldn’t hate her for it, but it still paralyzed him in a way.

She shook her head, still standing there clutching her vodka bottle. “I read your file. I chased you for almost a year. And...you said it. We both have these ideas of each other from a lot of stuff on paper. But I realized tonight that’s not you. And I want to get to know _you_.” She worried at her lower lip with her top teeth, holding up the vodka bottle in an awkward peace offering. “If that’s what you’d want.”

He could tell her to leave. He could invite her to stay. No point kicking her out. She already knew too much, and the genie wasn’t going back in that bottle. He might as well try to give her something to go with the man written on that paper, because she was right. He’d had the outline, but this Lucy, the one he was coming to know in fighting by her side, had come to love in a way that made his feelings before a pale shadow, was so much more vivid. Brave and clumsy and sometimes infuriating, but so real. Besides, it had felt good to let go, to reach out and be greeted with something more than grudging tolerance. Not like anyone else had knocked on that door except to demand he get ready to go on a mission, and he sensed that they generally were more comfortable when he confined himself to this room except when necessary. He’d spent months in a cell. Gotten a bit too used to this, apparently. _She’s here. She’s asking. You shut her out now, you probably don’t get this chance ever again._

He would have gestured her to the chair, but given he was already there and she was standing by his bed, he waved a hand towards it, indicating she should sit. “Nothing meant,” he hurried to say. “There’s just a lack of proper seating.” Although calling attention to the fact that he realized he’d just asked her to sit on his bed probably meant now she wondered if there was a reason he’d picked up on that. _Idiot._ He awkwardly reached for the glass of vodka she held out to him. “So, first question.” He gestured to tell her she should have at it.

Her eyebrows rose, head tilted as she regarded him with a curious expression. “All right, I’ve wondered ever since that first mission when they told me your name. How the heck does a Croatian end up with the name ‘Garcia Flynn’? Did you change it or what?”

“My paternal great-grandfather, Joseph Flynn, was an ANZAC.” He took a sip of the vodka. Cheap crap--Christopher clearly wasn’t putting out the cash for feeding her captive pets. But it would do the job. “Plenty of Irish surnames in Australia. He got captured at Gallipoli, sent to a POW camp near Dubrovnik, and fell in love with a local girl. And contrary bastard that he was, he decided to stay in the Balkans with her. Apparently it beat sheep farming back home.”

She laughed at that, sipping her own vodka. “So you come by your contrariness honestly. Got it. And Garcia?”

“One of Mom’s favorites was ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ So, Gabriel first, and then so I became Garcia. Plus her family, the Parkers--”

“Parker?” Of course as a historian, her ears couldn’t help but perk at that name, especially in relation to Texas. He should have expected it. 

He laughed lowly, sitting back in the chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “Probably only distantly related to Cynthia Anne and Quanah. Sorry to get your hopes up.” She smiled ruefully, acknowledging he’d caught her out. “But they married across the border plenty in the 19th century. Garcia was also a family surname. And my father was all right with that, given he was actually Ilija, not Asher. He’d found it easier to go by a Western name.” He’d grant that his father had been right on that. “And I think...he let her do it because he wanted her to be happy. Then.” Before it turned to bitterness and recrimination and jealousy and rage.

“It’s hard to be with someone once you realize you’re second best. That they’ve never been able to let go.” Her voice went husky at that. He didn’t know if she meant Wyatt, or some previous lover who’d just been an ass about an ex, but obviously she’d felt that. 

He took a healthy slug of the vodka in response to burn out the feelings welling up in his own chest. “He’d lost his first wife a few years back too. They were a mismatch but they were both lonely, and they got married too quickly because of it. And neither of them could be what the other needed, so she buried herself in her work and raising me, and he buried himself in a vodka bottle.”

She let out an awkward strangled noise, looking at the vodka sitting now on his nightstand. “I didn’t think--”

He looked at her coolly, took another sip of vodka to make the point, and because that emptied the glass, he went to go refill it. He glanced over at her as he put the cap back on the bottle. “I’m not my father.” Tried so damn hard to not make it sound like he was defensively pleading with her to believe it. “Just like you’re not your mother.” Going back to the chair, he propped his left foot on his right knee, settling in. “My turn.” She looked so crestfallen still that he searched for safer territory. “Middle name?”

“Joan.”

“Joan of Arc?”

“Of course.”

“A warrior-prophetess.” He caught her eye. “Appropriate.” She blushed. Maybe a bit less so than the Lucy he’d met in 2014, the tigress who’d killed a Rittenhouse agent without blinking, who’d brought him the journal and all its prophecy. But he could see that Lucy emerging within this Lucy now too, like a Victorian spirit photograph, a spectral form that he'd known superimposed on a vividly real person he knew now. Promising him she’d do whatever it took, and the new steel within her to stand and fight. He could fault Carol Preston for a long list of things, starting with being a chief player in Rittenhouse, or maybe at this point starting with the way she’d made her daughter cringe and apologize and stumble her way through life with that crushing sense of inferiority.

Lucy emptied her own drink and reached for the bottle, neatly pouring more into her glass. “Yours is...Mihajlo?”

“Mihajlo,” he corrected her pronunciation. “It’s pronounced like ‘y’, not a ‘j’.”

“It was in the file,” she said with a look of apology. “Michael, though, as in archangel? The warrior-guardian?” She gave him a knowing smile. “Appropriate.” 

He was tired, given time travel beat jet lag like nobody’s business, and drinking, so maybe he imagined it. But still, something in that smile, light and mischief and the hint of something more… _oh, dammit, don’t look at me like that. Especially when you’re sitting on my bed--cot--whatever._ Like the look he’d thought he caught out of the corner of his eye in that juke joint, something that took his breath for a moment. _She’s drinking. You’re drinking._ Drinking seemed like a great idea right then, so more vodka it was, if only to have something to do so he wasn’t awkwardly gawking at her like a lovestruck schoolboy. Then he realized that expectant look meant it was his turn to ask a question.

“If not history, what would you have done?”

She mulled that over while turning the glass around and around in her hands, a faraway look in her eyes. “I’m not sure. I mean, I had a plan to drop out of school when I was twenty. Go on the road with a band.” She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around then, and he was no Freud--who was a dick anyway--but the protectiveness of the posture said something about the whole experience and how it clung to her still.

It was so mundanely youthful-rebel that he couldn’t help but laugh, oddly heartened to hear about a younger Lucy planning to tell her mother and all her manipulations to go get stuffed. “What happened that you didn’t?”

“I hit an oil patch, spun my car into the water on my way home to tell Mom. Almost drowned, until someone stopped, and pulled me out.” She looked up, staring at him intensely for a few moments in silence, until an eerie shiver went down his spine for no reason he could explain. Brows suddenly furrowing. “No, of course not.”

“What?”

“I never saw who it was. I had a shallow water blackout, wasn’t seeing clearly, and it was night besides. Just some guy who stops, dives in, breaks the window and pulls me out of the car. Swims me to safety, tells me to keep still, and then he’s gone and there’s a woman there saying she’ll stay with me, she’s actually a nurse, and she’s called the ambulance. That my rescuer was an FBI agent who had to go respond to an emergency. And...he had an accent. He said so little. And...I thought he called me by my name, but my ears were ringing. But it couldn’t have been you. That was January, 2003. I don’t know where the heck you were in 2003, but I doubt it was San Francisco--”

“Then? I was in Afghanistan. Went to Iraq later that year.” But that eerie hair-raising feeling was back, and now he could place it. No, he’d been in Afghanistan. Mosul, probably. But he’d seen in São Paulo that there were more things in heaven and earth, and the vaunted _Can’t cross your own lifeline_ rule apparently got violated sometime in the near future. So maybe...maybe some future Garcia Flynn had been in San Francisco that night. He’d seen himself in 2014, knew he was still alive in that future. Seeing her there so young and so terrified, in the adrenaline surge of having rescued her from dying, he easily would have made the mistake of calling her by her name. Because when it came to Lucy Preston, his time traveling etiquette apparently went right out the God-damned window. Whether or not she ever cared in return, he doubted very much he’d feel any less intensely five years from now. 

But he couldn’t open that can of worms right now. Every time he’d tried to tell her about the journal, about that future and explain it all about how she was the reason he was even here, she’d shied away from it like a hot iron. He couldn’t tell her. Maybe someday she’d want to hear and be ready. “Sounds like just a busy federal agent who really did have to get going.” Odd that given they seemed able to share secrets tonight with honesty that was the one thing he’d hold back, but it felt right. Some revelations weren’t meant to happen yet.

“Guess so. Anyway, I wouldn’t say I was exactly religious before that, and I guess I was for a while after, but that kind of felt like it was a giant neon sign from God, you know?”

His own sign from God had walked in dressed in jeans and a raspberry colored blouse far too nice for the shithole tiki bar he’d been in that night. Nothing neon about her, but no less vibrant and unable to be ignored. He nodded.

“So I never told Mom. I stayed in school. I don’t think I really wanted to do the whole band thing, not as a profession. I love history, it’s what I really wanted to do. But...I just wanted to choose something for myself, you know?”

“I can imagine. So you were going to be the drummer, yes?”

She gave him a look of mock indignation. “Singer. I’ll have you know I delivered a showstopping performance in 1941 Hollywood to a room full of bigwigs. Even Hedy Lamar was very impressed.”

“Wish I could have seen that.” The words were out of his mouth before he could pull them back.

~~~~~~~~~~

He said it wistfully, and then she thought he looked away a little too quickly and suddenly looked too interested in topping off his glass again, but maybe it was her imagination. It reminded her that he’d been sitting in prison, angry and despondent, recovering from an attempt on his life, while she was busy living it up in the giddy whirl of life at Paramount. Handing Wyatt her heart and her hope only to have their romance destroyed by a single text, burned away in a blinding flash like nitrate-based film. Trying to drag her own thoughts from that darkness, she looked up at him standing at the nightstand with the bottle in his hand, and gently teased him. “Maybe that band isn’t such a bad idea. We should start one. Homeland Security proudly presents: the Time Team’s new album, ‘Rusty Bunker Jams’. Mason can produce.”

That expression was purely the lazy, self-satisfied smile of a cat basking in the sunlight. “I’m in. It’ll drive Agent Christopher crazy.”

“Done. What do you play--kazoo?”

“Guitar.” He shrugged self-consciously. “Lots of nights without much to do. I had a--friend, Danilbek. In Chechnya. He taught me.” If that hesitation on _friend_ had been any more unable to be ignored, she’d have called it the Grand Canyon of awkward pauses. _So you’re bi. You can actually say it, you know, rather than doing the good old whole ‘meaningful pause’ act._ Though she knew how it went. Be careful how and where she said it, not unless she knew the person was safe, and old habit was hard to break. Easier to be out and proud when things like tenure and funding weren’t on the line, and a woman had to fight so much harder for for her place to start. Though for him, being a man in a paramilitary job, that was its own challenge--well, a lot had changed since Spartan days. It wasn’t right, but that didn’t mean the fear wasn’t still there. She’d ask him more about this Danilbek later, but clearly, not tonight.

“Well, I also ended things with my--friend,” giving the exact same pause that he did, “Marissa, who’d been the one trying to get me to join the band.” That would have been the other revelation Carol Preston couldn’t have handled on Lucy's 20th birthday. Especially not when she clearly wanted Lucy to pump out a few Rittenhouse heirs. “So, clearly you missed your calling as a death metal guitarist, but what did you plan to be when you grew up, when you realized ‘cowboy’ wasn’t a viable career path anymore?” She held her glass out, and he neatly poured another bit of vodka into it.

“I’ll have you know that was one of the crushing disappointments of my young life.” Looking down at her, the corner of his mouth turned up. He turned, headed back to the chair, and sat down again. The chair, probably held together with prayers and wire, protested. “I had weeks of fantasizing about time travel. Asked Mom if she could please go build me a time machine. I’d contribute my allowance for the necessary parts, of course.” She couldn’t help but laugh at that, and he gave a slow, sheepish smile at that, looking at the heap of books on his desk. “Actually, once I was older, I wanted to teach.” He glanced up, eyes meeting hers almost shyly. “History, in fact.” Typical historian that she was, she wanted to launch right into asking him about his favorite time period, but she held off, sensing she’d get more out of him than if she bombarded him with a flurry of questions.

“Things…happened, of course,” _things at home_ , she interpreted, “and I left school, and after Croatia won its independence there was always some new conflict where I thought I could help.”

God. He’d been fighting more or less since he was a child, and something within her hurt at that fact. “It wasn’t all fighting. Lots of time spent waiting. Guitar, sometimes, and I usually had books in my rucksack,” he tapped his temple with two fingers, “Mom’s voice in my head telling me that I’d better get my education, because I couldn’t do this forever. Took a while, but I got an equivalency, and then once the NSA came along, I managed to get them to agree to helping me get through school.” He gave a smirk. “Especially for the undergraduate, they got very creative with things that qualified for credits, exams I could take, and the like.”

“Geography?” she guessed. “Languages–how many do you speak, anyway?”

The smirk deepened, told her, _Wouldn’t you like to know?_ “Ah, now, can’t give away all my secrets. Enough to add Modern Languages as a double major. I said I’d give them five, maybe ten years as a field asset while I worked on the Master’s. And I’d still be an home-based intel asset for them as needed, but no more missions after that. I–we–wanted something quieter.” He’d had a wife, a child. Of course he’d wanted something that would let him spend more time with them. “They readily bought in because I’d be close to DC anyway. We were going to move to Baltimore so Lorena and the kids could be around her family.”

 _Kids._ They’d planned on having more. Maybe they’d even been trying. She ached for him in that moment, realizing just what he’d lost. 2018: he’d have put in his ten years, would have finished that MA. He’d be in Baltimore now, teaching somewhere. Going home to his wife and children every night. He’d earned his years of peace, but instead, here he was, caught in yet another seemingly-endless war. “I’m sorry.” He nodded in acknowledgment of that, looking for a moment a thousand miles away. 

“Where did you meet her?” The woman he’d been willing to utterly burn down the world to bring back to life was little more than a name, a birthdate, and a few shadowy details, including the recent revelations that she was a Bing Crosby fan, had cold feet at night, and liked pranking her husband.

He gave her a dark, impatient, _don’t play stupid_ look. “You read my file, Lucy,” he enunciated the words with excessive patience. “Darfur, 2005. She was a nurse there with the Red Cross.”

“I didn’t read those transcripts from 2013. Your...ah, marital stuff. It was fair to go after you professionally, but when I saw that was, well, completely personal...” He might coolly dismiss it as gathering intelligence on an adversary, but she’d seen the way he inhaled too deeply as if controlling himself only with effort, the cringe to his head and shoulders he hadn’t quite concealed as well as he probably thought he had. 

He looked directly at her, shaking his head with an expression of incredulous, admiring wonder, like he could barely believe she was real. “How the hell someone like you came from two people as unscrupulous as Benjamin Cahill and Carol Preston, I truly have no idea.”

She laughed uncomfortably at that, taking another sip of the vodka. “My mother would probably call me not reading those transcripts my foolish naivete.” _Lucy, really. You have such a good heart, but how about the wisdom to go with it? You know how people take advantage of you._

He took a healthy slug himself, glancing at her over the rim of his glass. “That’s your mother talking. Your brand of faith seems to have worked on me. You kept me from doing--no, I did plenty of unforgivable things. But with John Rittenhouse...Lucy, you were right. And I know some part of me wanted you to stop me, even as I was furious with myself for being willing to do it, and furious with you for stopping me after I’d already paid that price in my mind. But you did. So...thank you.” He smiled at her, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Even if I didn’t deserve the faith.”

She wanted to grab hold of that smile, and the feeling rising in her chest, and keep it close. But she couldn’t lie, couldn’t accept his gratitude. Not given what she knew now. So she shook her head. “You were right about John, though,” she said dully. “He grew up to be everything you said he would.”

Something intent entered his expression then, wiping the smile from his face, and he leaned forward in his chair. “How do you know that? You told me that he disappeared off the map, Lucy. Or did you lie about that to keep him alive?”

“No, I couldn’t find any traces of him. But...while my mom had me held prisoner with Rittenhouse, she...told me something.” She chewed her lip, looking back up at him, settling back in his chair with a crease of confusion in his brow. She shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t inflict one more wound on him. Selfish too, because this had to be the moment she threw everything they had tentatively built, and might still build, on the pyre.

He sat there, motionless as a marble statue, the half-full glass of vodka still held loosely in his hand. The only movement was in those green eyes, burning intensely as he watched her. “What did she tell you?”

She sucked in a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. She couldn’t look up at his face as she said it, and watch the last traces of softness and affection fade away forever. “That she and I are the last remaining direct descendants of David Rittenhouse. Which means John Rittenhouse is also my ancestor, which means that yes, he totally bought into his dad’s creepy ideals, and he’s the only reason Rittenhouse survived, because I wouldn’t let you kill him.” She let out a bitter laugh, feeling like if she didn’t laugh and keep a tight stranglehold on it, she’d start sobbing uncontrollably, and maybe never stop. “I’m pretty much the Heir of Slytherin, Flynn.” _My heritage is everything you loathe, Flynn. Everything that cost you the people you loved, your ability to sleep at night, your feeling like you don't deserve anything more than to martyr yourself in this Goddamn time war. So, what do you think of me now?_

She wondered for a wild moment if he’d had a gun on him if she would look up to see it pointed at her own forehead this time. As if it mattered whether he had a gun or not. Garcia Flynn could kill her probably two dozen different ways. He could probably find some way to kill her with that stupid glass tumbler, or a three-ring binder. 

_No, be honest_. She hadn’t been afraid of him killing her, ever since he made that awkward and unnerving attempt to recruit her in the flames of the _Hindenburg_. Something in her had sensed even then that she mattered too much to him, even when her mind told her this terrorist they had her chasing was dangerous and totally nuts with his Rittenhouse delusions, for him to so casually make her into yet another body cooling in the rubble of history left in his wake. 

_So what are you afraid of?_ Silently, she had to admit to herself that maybe what she feared most was the way he looked at her, that regard he had. Like she mattered. Maybe first thinking she was a critical cog in his vendetta, but lately...tonight especially...like for him, she wasn’t mediocre, a historian with failed tenure, always needing to be rescued, forever the bridesmaid, failing to save her sister, a disappointment of a daughter. Flynn looked at her as if he believed she was capable of really anything. 

As for her, she certainly knew how to kill a room. The silence stretched out unbearably, what felt like aeons contained in seconds. She swallowed hard, risking a sidelong glance at him and seeing he’d leaned forward, elbows now resting on his knees, head half-bowed. “I’ll just go--”

He held up a hand, gesturing her to stop. “That’s...a lot to take in, Lucy,” he said, not looking up yet. “Just give me a moment.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Every time the pit seemed like it couldn’t go deeper, it did. John Rittenhouse. A 12-year-old brat parroting his father’s horrifying eugenics and tyranny. Standing there in Rittenhouse’s study with that dark, oily strangling python of self-loathing tightening within him as he realized yes, there was further to fall, because here was the next step in his damnation. He’d have to exterminate the Rittenhouse line entirely, and he’d wanted to yell at God that this latest fucking cruel joke was most definitely not appreciated.

He’d sold one of the few remaining shreds of his soul with his willingness to execute a child, a child pleading with him with a tear-stained face. And not only had John survived, and fulfilled all that dark promise, his bloodline went on. Ran in Lucy’s veins. It curdled within him, sick and slow, and he’d had his share of vodka but that wasn't the reason he felt the sudden lightheaded nausea.

John’s face. _Lucy’s_ face as she told him, dark eyes wide, features drawn tense with anxiety, the tight evenness to her words that told him how much she held back. God. She seemed afraid that he’d turn on her--psychologically, or even physically--but it must have been even worse for her to live with herself. If he was her, he would have wanted to drain the very blood from his veins, because it must have felt like poison. She was descended from two and a half centuries of manipulative cultish sociopaths. Her own many-times-great-grandfather had threatened to forcibly father a child on her. He suddenly wanted to go back to 1780 simply to kill the bastard again.

Rittenhouse, blood and bone, born and bred. And yet...and yet. This was Lucy. He knew Lucy. Knew the thoughts she’d put down on paper for him, knew the woman who’d shown up in that bar, who’d dragged him to a cathedral and given him faith again. Knew her even better tonight than he ever had, because she was a person, sometimes flawed and fearful, but all the more vivid for it. And God knew he himself knew about fear that evil was in the blood, and trying so damn hard to take another path. 

He managed a deep breath finally, and threw back the rest of the glass of vodka because right then he needed it. He noticed her glass was empty too. Couldn’t blame her. He held his glass out for another pour. 

“You were right. Killing him wouldn’t have changed anything.” Best to touch on that aspect of her nightmare first. “Arnold, Rittenhouse, they both said there were many followers already. That this wouldn’t end it. John was just a boy. He couldn’t have kept Rittenhouse going by himself. He had to have people who sheltered him, took him in, hid him from the record, raised him and kept it going until he was old enough to take his place at the head of the table. Made him their protected _prince_ ,” and he couldn’t help the growl of the last word. “And even if we--no, I,” he had to claim his own sins, “had killed him, that means those followers were devoted and fanatical enough they would have kept Rittenhouse going with David and John as their martyrs. Either way, it was a lost cause.” A bad plan on his part at that; almost got them all killed. He’d made that one up on the fly, driven to a desperate wild hope by the idea of killing just one more man and unraveling the whole spiderweb, and it had burned them. 

“You’re right. So maybe we just need to go back to 1740, 1750 and kill David when he’s old enough to fairly murder, but before he starts recruiting.” He wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not. There was something bleak and hard in her voice still.

He shook his head. “We go kill him before John is born, what happens to you?” _Honestly, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to you, but whatever it is, it’s probably not good._

She must have known where his thoughts turned. “Benjamin was alive in 1954, you know. Pretty easily accessible information.” She looked at him, cocking her head a bit aside, pinning him mercilessly with that knowing gaze he couldn’t ignore, looking right into his still oh-so-ragged soul in all its forlorn glory. Another echo of that woman he’d met in 2014. “Did you not look because you honestly didn’t care, or because you assumed with Rufus out of commision we wouldn’t be able to chase you, and you didn’t want to know whether I’d likely be erased, because that would make the mission harder?”

She’d seen right through him, as ever. He couldn’t lie. Couldn’t breathe either. “The latter.” Hoped she wouldn’t ask _Why am I so important?_ because he had too many answers for that, and only one that she’d know as the overarching truth. 

She nodded, accepting that, and that piercing gaze softened. “Mason concluded that I’d be like Amy’s pictures. I’d exist, because I was preserved in the past while that future was being erased, but when I got back home, nobody left behind would remember me, and there would be no record of my existence. A…’time ghost’ he called it.” She gave a bleak smile, swirling the last bit of vodka in her glass and looking down at it. “I could do worse than getting rid of all the Rittenbaggage, I suppose.” 

He couldn’t stand seeing her like this. “You told me about choices that night, you remember that? Said we all could be something different. John let you down. But you haven’t let yourself down. You’ve chosen over and over to help people, not control them. You’re not Lucy Rittenhouse. You’re Lucy Preston. And...I’m honored to fight alongside you.”

Could he sound more awkward? Her head lifted, and she brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. He thought for a moment her eyes shone a bit too bright, and wondered if he should look away and give her that privacy, or if that would be implying she should be ashamed. So he didn’t. She looked at his glass and nodded towards it. “We shouldn’t waste this, but...after that, I think we’ve both had enough.”

The bottle was still half full, and in his mind, he had the thought of her journal talking about too many nights with vodka, struggling. He couldn’t let her go to hell like that, so it relieved him to hear her put a stop to it. “Agreed.”

She half raised her glass and then hesitated. “You’re not your father, and I’m not my mother. So...to choices.” 

He raised his glass in salute. “To choices.” 

Finishing the drink and putting the glass aside on the nightstand, she asked, “How do you do a toast in Croatian anyway?”

He saw the clumsy attempt to turn the corner to lighter matters for what it was, but it was welcome all the same. “ _Živjeli_.” She echoed it almost perfectly, and he grinned at her. “And I imagine the next thing you’ll want to ask about is how to curse, so I’d suggest ‘ _Nemoj me jebat_ ’. Which is more or less, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ ” 

She gave a giggling snort. “Yeah, OK. Easy for you to say. Sounds a lot more impressive coming from some paramilitary tree of a man.”

“You’re very intimidating in your own way,” he assured her. She pointedly rolled her eyes and gave a pouting smirk at him. Yeah, she’d had a little too much. “But fine, have it your way, ‘ _jebote_ ’ is your all purpose ‘fuck’.“

“As in, ‘ _Jebote_ ’, all I want is to get out of this bunker and see some sunlight?” She chewed her lip. “Sorry. Didn’t think about the whole,” she waved an awkward hand in the air, “uh, y’know. Spending months in prison thing.”

He shrugged dismissively. “ _Jebiga._ ”

Her brow furrowed in concentration. “Fuck...this?”

“More like ‘well, fuck it, I can’t do anything about it’. Appropriate for both being stuck in decrepit bunkers and months in solitary confinement, running out of coffee after the store’s closed, and so forth. Though I might suggest _jebemti_ for being pissed off, or _jebemu_ if you’re sympathizing, or...”

She leaned in, laughing and shaking her head. “You’re kidding. C'mon. How many words for ‘fuck’ does Croatian have?”

“Just wait. We’ll get you all the way to using ‘ _vukojebina_ ’ someday. I think the American equivalent is ‘the ass end of nowhere.’” She was tipsy and that was obvious, but she’d let go because of it. Her laughter, that unguarded dorkish snorting giggle, made him smile. All right, maybe his head was swimming a bit too, but it wasn’t all the vodka. Not with the way his heart ached tonight.

~~~~~~~~~~

She wasn’t drunk, but she was to the point nothing hurt, the sweet fire of the vodka giving her a pleasant buzz. And he didn’t hate her. He didn’t hate her, and God, that felt so good. That low rumble of _I’m honored to fight alongside you._ Like she mattered. She looked over at him and asked, “Seriously, I’m not kidding, just how many languages do you speak anyway?”

He still didn’t give her a straight answer. “ _Ti si lijepa, Lucy, und ich bewundern dich. Tu coraje, tvayo sostradaniye…_ ”

Croatian, presumably, and she recognized the sound of German, half-understood the Spanish, guessed the one was probably Russian, and he looked ready to just keep rattling them off. “ _Ce n'est pas juste!_ ” 

" _Mais c'est honnête,_ " he replied smartly with a pleased smirk. Smug bastard. _Of course_ he spoke French also. 

She threw out the last weapon she thought she could possibly muster. “ _Quid intelligis quod?_ ” That might not be fully right. Her Latin was a lot better in translating reading than her actually speaking or writing it, but she hoped it was enough to bluff her way past him.

He inclined his head and applauded softly in acknowledgment, laughing and looking thrilled she’d actually gotten the last word. That did something to her, deep and low in her belly, that probably also had a specific dirty word in Croatian. “ _Touché_. You’ve got me there--something about my intelligence? Didn’t think a scholar of American political movements would have much cause for Latin.”

She liked this Flynn, his green eyes dancing with laughter, sitting here teaching her dirty words. Remembered him laughing in Carrie Thompson’s juke joint, totally into the music. Wanting to get to know her, awkward and humble but totally sincere. The room suddenly felt so small. It was only a few steps and she could lean down, put her hands on those broad shoulders. _One, you’re drunk. Noooo, just tipsy. But tipsy’s bad enough. Besides. Do you actually want to kiss Garcia Flynn, or are you just so lonely, and so happy he doesn’t loathe you now that he knows? Happy too that he doesn’t seem to think you’re sloppy seconds after Wyatt? Are you just so, so grateful that after all those years of Mommy Dearest and her criticisms, here’s someone for whom you’re finally enough? You’re getting off on that, aren’t you? You want to grab it and run with it before he sees everything, and knows better._

She blurted, “There are actually quite a few private personal notes jotted in Latin and Greek. Not surprising given the political movers and shakers of the colonial era and early republic were white gentlemen with a classical education.” She’d stepped back too far for safety, trotting out a historical lecture like a note from a PowerPoint for students, and she suppressed a wince. But her eyes were so heavy right now. Her head was so heavy. Everything was so heavy. 

Then there was the velvet darkness, the drowsy feeling of something being draped over her, and a soft murmur, a light pressure on her shoulder for a moment. “Sleep well.” 

Waking, rolling over onto her back and pushing the wool blanket from where it scratched her cheek, she had the dazed thought, _Doesn’t feel like the couch._ Then she felt the dull ache behind her eyes and winced. Had she been drinking last night? Opening her eyes, she saw the figure across the room in the chair and her heart leaped in panic. Then she scraped together enough awareness--not a serial killer. But still, she’d fallen asleep in Flynn’s room. _In Flynn’s bed._ What the hell had happened? They’d been talking, there was vodka, and now here she was. Sitting up, she started trying to apologize, scrubbing fretful hands over her face, raking her unruly hair from her eyes. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” 

“Nothing to apologize for.” She glanced over at him, kicking off the blanket. He gazed upwards thoughtfully, as if reminiscing. Had he really spent the whole night asleep in that Godawful chair? “You were a gentle and responsive lover.” 

OK, what was the word? _Jebote_? Had they really--but her clothes were all on, weren’t they? Frantically searching her mind, there was nothing. She would have remembered something, right? Even if she was completely blotto, she would have a flicker of memory. But God, the last thing she needed was to jump from her epic one-night-disaster with Wyatt to a drunken screw she couldn’t even remember, and the worst part was she couldn’t tell herself she’d _never_. Because maybe she would have. Maybe that was what she’d been half-hoping for when she knocked on his door last night, even if she’d told him, and herself, she was there to keep talking. Because it felt like a better relief from the pain than the vodka. “I wasn’t _that_ drunk,” she said, looking over at him, hoping for some kind of confirmation. 

His serene expression broke, and he laughed, a giddy chuckle that lit up his face, which he then promptly covered with his hand, shoulders still shaking with laughter. “Nothing happened.” Still grinning, he turned towards the desk, grabbing a cup of coffee. “Though I appreciate the look of abject horror on your face.” He held the coffee out to her, looking up at her in a mischievous way that if he was trying to make her think about actually yanking him down to that ridiculous excuse of a bed, he was doing a good job. “Thanks for that.” 

_It’s not you, it’s me._ Such a cliche, but it really was true. Not horrified at the idea of him, per se, _oh come on, Lucy, you’ve had a few choice dreams lately about climbing that man like a damn tree, it’s a little more than “not horrified”_. More horrified at the idea she’d maybe gone and slept with him in some weird thing to deal with the whole Wyatt And Jessica Interactive Drama Dinner Theater. It’d feel good, but everything within her was such a mess that she couldn’t give Flynn more than a joyride, and he loved a dead woman still, and he deserved more than that from her. Right now...right now it was less complicated to just _not_. 

She couldn’t explain all that, though. _I could see myself sleeping with you, but right now I have nothing else to give you. And that’s not fair._ She settled for an awkward murmur of “God, I’m so sorry.” She’d invaded his space, interrupted whatever he was doing, got tipsy and probably said something stupid she couldn’t quite remember, took up his bed and made a giant of a man sleep in that ridiculously uncomfortable chair, and now insulted him by making him think she thought he was repellent. Lucy Preston, earning negative points again. Not to mention he’d put up with her rambling, let her sleep in his bed, put the blanket over her, pulled her boots off, and woken up to make her coffee. More than some people she'd actually dated had managed. 

“It’s all right. I enjoyed the company.” His accent was thicker, probably because he too was just waking up. The tone of his voice, low and soft, stirred something in her. Not her libido, but something gentler. He’d been living in this bunker for close to two months now, and when she thought about it, he usually hid away in his room between missions. Obviously sensed he wasn’t exactly welcome by all members of the team, and except for brazening his way through it occasionally with defensively snarky remarks, he gracefully sidestepped the issue by isolating himself. Was she really the only one who talked to him when it wasn’t out of necessity? Probably, and he probably hadn’t had much of anyone to talk to for three and a half years now. 

Sipping the coffee, she couldn’t help but give a rueful laugh. The man who everyone avoided and who’d been basically time travel’s hermit-slash-terrorist they’d spent the better part of a year hunting down, who’d been here and on their side such a short time, and she’d spilled her guts to him last night about things she didn’t dare tell Rufus or Wyatt or Jiya. “What?” he asked. 

“No, it’s just...don’t take this the wrong way.” Was there any way to put this that wasn’t insulting? She looked at him as she said it, willing him to hear the compliment in it. “I just think it’s kind of insane that out of all the people here, you’re the easiest to talk to.” 

She could have sworn he actually blushed, looking down and away like a bashful schoolboy. That...that she did not expect. Some of the softness faded from his expression then. “Well, we’ve both lost our families to Rittenhouse,” his eyes met hers, unguarded and the hurt in them was an echo of hers, “and we’re both alone.” 

It hurt to hear it stated so plainly. She wasn’t sure whether it was the hurt of the knife twisting, or of lancing the infection. Maybe some of both. But she couldn’t deny he’d cut right to the heart of it. He’d lost Lorena and Iris. She’d lost Amy, lost her mother too when Carol Preston made her choice. She’d _pleaded_ with Carol to turn back, and once again, Lucy hadn’t been enough for her mother. Rufus had Jiya, Wyatt had Jessica. She and Flynn: they didn’t have each other--did they?--but she’d never felt so utterly, achingly alone as she had in the past couple of months. She couldn’t answer him, but she had to nod to acknowledge the truth of it. 

He seemed to realize he’d killed the room, and sent her mind down darker paths, so he quipped, “We’re both geniuses?” She had to smile in spite of it, appreciating the unwieldiness of it that told her it was genuine. He kept his tone light as told her, “If anyone knows what you’re going through, it’s me.” But she heard the sincerity behind it all the same. 

She looked down and saw her boots sitting by the bed, and reached down to pull them on. Much as she’d like to stay, keep bending time so that this moment where everything felt more or less OK would keep stretching on and on, it was time to go face reality. Besides, she needed a shower and clean clothes. Getting to her feet, she told him, “Well, I will, ah...now remove myself from your personal space.” Oh, smooth. But the least she could do was acknowledge the imposition she’d been. Finishing the coffee at the door and putting the cup down on his nightstand, that was it. No more dawdling. But she had to thank him as best she could, even though she’d probably make a total train wreck of it. “Thank you for the coffee. And…” _Just talking, not assuming I was here to sleep with you. Not hating me for helping cost you six months in prison. Listening to me. Respecting me. Wanting to get to know me. Tucking me in. Not fucking me while I was tipsy when you probably could have. Caring. Do you know how long it’s been since somebody actually cared for me?_

Probably about as long as it had been for him. She settled for a completely inadequate “Yep.” Hands on the door, like Orpheus, she couldn’t help but glance back one more time, trying to tell him with a smile that she appreciated what he’d done. 

Her heart hurt at the look on his face, soft and gentle and somehow content, completely open and curiously vulnerable, as he said, “Anytime.” She’d seen him sarcastic, determined, violent, desperate, broken. Snark and fighting and a deep well of pain. But this--this Flynn, all alight, was completely foreign to her. _Is that who you were, before Rittenhouse got to you?_ No, this wasn’t who he’d been. It was who he was, another facet of him ruthlessly buried deep inside, and he’d dug it up, dusted it off, and showed it to her, trusting her with it. Something in her wanted to turn back, hug him fiercely, and tell him she’d keep that part of him safe. But like Orpheus, that might make the whole thing slip away. _I think...I could love you, Flynn. Someday. But I can’t right now. You deserve more than a hot mess._

So she slipped through the door, off to face the day. But it felt like leaving a safe haven behind, and she admitted to herself that of course she’d come back. Without the vodka--shit, she’d left it behind in his room. But maybe she wouldn’t need it. 


End file.
